California slaughterhouse should have hired Anton Chigurh

If your meal at Burger King or other establishments came from livestock… (Scott Olson, Getty Images…)

August 23, 2012|Paul Carpenter

Neal Carpenter of Mechanicsburg has a mean streak, which, obviously, he must have inherited from his mother.

In any case, he seemed to enjoy discussing the latest news from Hanford, Calif., where a calamity threatened an exquisite dining establishment — not to mention the trauma inflicted on those who believe in the humane treatment of animals, even the ones we eat.

According to news accounts brought to my attention by my son, federal regulators shut down a Hanford slaughterhouse after videos from an animal rights group showed workers bungling the processing of cows.

One showed a downed cow trembling and unable to stand as workers tried to pull her up by the tail. Another showed cows thrashing after inept attempts by workers at the Central Valley Meat Co. to render them unconscious, and a worker standing on a cow's muzzle, trying to suffocate it.

Although I eat meat, and although I've made fun of some of the sillier positions of animal rights groups, I seriously abhor the unnecessary mistreatment of any animal. That, however, was not the issue that compelled Neal to call me after he watched a news item on television this week.

"They showed Miley Cyrus going through an In-N-Out Burger," he said, and it turned out that the Hanford slaughterhouse was a major supplier of beef to that fast-food chain.

I would not know Miley Cyrus if she fell on me. I am vaguely aware she is an entertainer of some kind and is the daughter of a man who sang the most obnoxious country music song in history.

I have an almost religious devotion, however, to In-N-Out Burger. As I have reported on a number of previous occasions, it is the absolute pinnacle of epicurean excellence, as far as I'm concerned, and it is a great hardship for some of us that there are no In-N-Outs east of Texas.

When I want to experience the delights of fast food in Pennsylvania, I cater to Burger King and a few other establishments, which are pretty good, but not the same as getting a rare double-double on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. (Just try to get a juicy rare burger at any large fast-food chain around here.)

My favorite is the Burger King across MacArthur Road from the Lehigh Valley Mall, but that's only because they recently closed the one at Cedar Crest and Hamilton in South Whitehall Township. I was heartbroken when they did that.

With a BK Number 2 combo meal in mind, I decided to check into the Pennsylvania slaughterhouse situation, and the people at the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture said the best source would be Dr. Ed Mills, a professor of meat science at Penn State University. So I asked him about the most humane way to kill a cow.

"A captive bolt is far and away the most effective technique," Mills said.

A captive bolt? You mean like the pneumatic device used by Anton Chigurh, the delightfully morose homicidal maniac in the "No Country for Old Men" movie?

Mills said he has not yet seen that movie, which is set in the Chihuahuan Desert region of Texas, the only part of that state I like. But the device skillfully used by Chigurh is exactly the same as those used in Pennsylvania's slaughterhouses.

Chigurh would pop a little compressed air and a stainless steel bolt would slam the lock out of a door or scramble the brains of a human being he felt was in the way.

I told Mills about the way Chigurh opened doors. "Yeah, it would unlock a locked door, for sure," he said, and should work just as well on people or cows.

"Certainly, they [the workers at the Hanford plant] weren't using the captive bolt properly," Mills said. "It goes through the bone into the brain. … The animal is instantaneously knocked out."

He said captive bolt devices are widely used in Pennsylvania slaughterhouses. "I don't know of any that do not," he said.

I also checked the state law that deals with the way livestock must be handled at the end of their road.

The chapter of that law on the "slaughter and processing of domestic animals" requires the Agriculture Department to "establish standards for the humane slaughter" of animals and requires that "humane methods shall be used."

It stipulates that "a manually operated hammer, sledge or poleax [a horrible medieval weapon] is not a humane method of slaughter." (Before pneumatic captive bolt devices were invented in 1903 in Germany, the accepted way to knock out a cow was to hit it with a sledge hammer, etc.)

In California, according to the Animal Legal & Historical Center, state law allows a captive bolt device, a gunshot, electrical shock "or any other means that is rapid and effective." It does not stipulate "humane."

Getting back to my son's mean streak, he is aware of my fondness for both In-N-Out and Coen Brothers movies.

It was the Coen Brothers who gave us "No Country for Old Men" and most of the other movies worth seeing in recent years. I'm happy to point out that the Coen Brothers also have paid tribute to In-N-Out, notably in "The Big Lebowski," another of my favorite movies.